technicalities

July 30, 2008

Analog, September 2008

The September 2008 issue of Analog opens with a refreshingly positive depiction of faith in Henry G. Stratmann's "The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskay." The title character is a fairly conservative Christian who is stranded on Mars with her fiancé, Martin Slayton. (They wound up there in "The Paradise Project," a story in the November 2007 issue.) The story is an extraterrestrial transposition of Jesus' temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13), with aliens taking the diabolical role. They don't understand why Katerina won't sleep with Martin before they're married, or why she won't break her Lenten fast to eat the food they offer her:

"There is no need to fast if you are hungry and food is available. It is not intelligent to blindly obey rules that inflict unnecessary pain.

"Reflexively she clutched the cross hanging from the gold chain around her neck. 'My obedience isn’t blind. Fasting helps me practice self-control. We humans can be tempted to indulge desires that could cause unnecessary suffering later for ourselves and others. Eating this food now wouldn’t directly injure me. But by not eating it I make it easier to resist temptation when it really could cause harm.'

"That explains why you do not mate with your companion though you strongly desire him.

"Katerina wondered if the aliens understood what a blush meant. 'Yes, I want us to share our love in that way. But doing that now could put the new life we might create in danger. And if our unborn child or me died from a medical problem beyond our ability to deal with on this world, I know Martin would feel terrible pain too. As difficult as it’s been to abstain, it might be far worse if we didn’t.'

"Delayed gratification. An interesting concept."

The story presents Katerina's faith a bit bluntly— Martin is a bit too fond of regarding her cross pendant and saying things like "You may have faith that things will turn out okay, but..."— but it's miles beyond the "religion-means-narrowminded" shorthand of, say, Bond Elam's "A Plethora of Truth" last month. [It's interesting to note, however, that Analog has cropped the illustration for the story on their website, shown above. The original in the magazine extends for a good inch lower, and we see that the object Katerina is holding in her hands is a cross. Were they worried about what their more anti-religious readers would think...?]

Given the greater nuance on display in Stratmann's story, it's particularly dismaying to see the tired clichés that Tom Eastman trots out in his book review column. In discussing the National Academy of Sciences' Science, Evolution, and Creationism, he drops this doozy:

"Scriptural explanations definitely do conflict with scientific explanations, and to the extent that religion and science endeavor to explain the same things, they do conflict. Only when religion confines itself to the discussions of the nonexistent (the supernatural, or the spiritual), does it not conflict with science, which can only say about such things, 'No evidence.'"

Why is it that atheists are so dogmatic about the meaning of Scripture? Do they really think that there is no interpretation that goes into a so-called "literalist" reading? Is there no room for poetry in the soul of Tom Eastman? And that passage ain't got nothing on what follows it:

"Does that sound harsh? So be it. The only value of religion that I have ever been able to discern is that it helps people live amicably together, and that tends to work best in religiously homogeneous societies. In pluralistic societies, it far too often breaks down."

Eastman seem to think that all faith is fundamentalism, that all believers wish that our society was "religiously homogeneous," and that pluralistic society forces these authoritarian aspirations to "break down." (This seems to be a pretty popular paranoia among atheists, and it's something I hope to write more about soon.) So, when Eastman (grudgingly?) acknowledges later in the same paragraph that creationists are a minority among the faithful, it comes across as more than a little self-contradictory. If he knows that creationists are a minority, does that mean he thinks that Congregationalists secretly want to overthrow the government? A 200-word book review is hardly the place for the sort of pontificating that Eastman attempts here, and he ends up sounding deeply uninformed and more than a little pompous. (Does that sound harsh? So be it.)

Comments

Well, I won't comment on the Eastman thing, since I didn't read it. I do think there is, as you say, a dogmatic faction among secular folk, which insists that the more dogmatic, literal and modern interpretation is obviously the correct way approach scripture. These are the same people who routinely criticize religious moderates for being wishy-washy and hold up fundies as the REAL religious people... who happen to be evil and wrong. Which is why science must destroy religion blah blah blah rant rant.

It's the old fundamentalist/rationalist-two-sides-to-a-coin situation. One side says "Scientific explanations are all that matter, and the Bible is obviously wrong about those!" The other retorts "The Bible has to be literally right, which means it's obviously literally right about scientific explanations, which is why we believe in creationism."

I don't think there's much hope of intervening in these squabbles. Better to just practice a more open-ended approach.

I think Eastman was probably of the opinion, and it seems a not unreasonable one to me, that the correct interpretation means interpreting it in the manner it was meant to be understood by its authors.

Sure, we atheists acknowledge that there are modern liberal interpretations of religious writings which attempt to harmonize scripture with science.

But is that how it was intended to be understood by the authors?

Of course, one is free to disagree with this idea of the correct interpretation of scripture. I, for one, am by no means dogmatically committed to it. Though it does seem a sensible option.

What, by the way, do you consider the correct theory on which scripture should be interpreted?

One problem many of us nonbelievers have with the way many liberal believers interpret scripture is that they seem to start from the premise that scripture is true and, therefore, when one's interpretation conflicts with science we need to change our interpretation to bring it more in accord with modern knowledge.

This approach, however, fails to acknowledge a reasonable possibility---that the writers of scripture were simply in error on this particular issue.

I am not painting all liberal believers with the same brush. I'm well aware some DO think scripture is sometimes mistaken. But many seem inclined to salvage the truth of scripture in the light of modern science by simply finding inventing an interpretation that somehow harmonizes them, usually by making the passage metaphorical, and then deciding that this must be the "correct" interpretation.

In other words, too many liberals seem just as inclined as the conservatives to assume from the start a scriptural passage is not in error. They just have a different approach. Instead of the denial of modern science the increasing "metaphorizing" of scriptural interpretation.

Of course, if, in fact, scripture IS in error both approaches will fail to arrive at the truth.

I think you've really just restated the problem, which is that both atheists and creationists have a fairly naive concept of our ability to understand "the manner [Scripture] was meant to be understood by its authors." You ask what I think the correct interpretation of scripture is, and I can only answer-- which scripture? Different books, and different parts of those books, were written at different times, for different audiences, for different purposes. How they are read today is very different from how they were read when written, whether its readers be liberal, conservative, or atheist. (That doesn't mean that all modern-day readings are invalid-- just that they're different.)

The problem shared by creationists and many atheists is that both assume that the purpose of the one part of the Bible they obsess over-- the opening of Genesis-- simply MUST have been intended as a comprehensive description of the physical universe. I don't think it was, not thousands of years ago and not now. It may be cliche to say so, but I think different cultures and eras have different understandings of what "truth" is, and the creationist-and-atheist reading of Genesis (since I think that it was you were really talking about) is an anachronism. You talk about the "increasing 'metaphorization' of scriptural interpretation," but that's kind of begging the question-- assuming that everyone read Genesis 1 as if it were a newspaper article for centuries, until Science created a need for metaphorical distance. IMHO, it simply ain't so. There are many kinds of truth: there is the truth of a physical object, and there is the truth of a story.

"both atheists and creationists have a fairly naive concept of our ability to understand "the manner [Scripture] was meant to be understood by its authors."

A very broad generalization.

"You ask what I think the correct interpretation of scripture is, and I can only answer-- which scripture? Different books, and different parts of those books, were written at different times, for different audiences, for different purposes."

Very true. So let us then limit the issue to the creation stories in the Bible. How do you interpret them and how do you think they were intended to be interpreted by their authors? And, also, how do you think they were interpreted by the christian church both in its original form and through its history?

Has a fairly literal interpretation predominated? Does it predominate today? And, if so, is it not reasonable for Eastman to criticize such an interpretation as contrary to science?

That he does so does not mean he doesn't recognize that other christian interpretations exist but christian liberals are, after all, a minority. I don't think its incumbent on him to pay equal attention to the interpretation of what is, in fact, a rather small percentage of christians.